


Sea, Fire and Woman, Three Evils

by Penrose_Quinn



Category: Magi: Adventure of Sinbad (Anime), Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Artemyran!Reader, Canon Compliant, F/M, Nonlinear timelines, Sidelined Romance, Smut, Worldbuilding dump, eventual angst, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 02:42:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20686199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penrose_Quinn/pseuds/Penrose_Quinn
Summary: He meets you from the edge of the world. You mislead him within yours.





	Sea, Fire and Woman, Three Evils

**Author's Note:**

> [1] While Artemyra doesn’t represent Ancient Greece, there will be Greek anachronisms in terms of lore here and there. The country of Akaea is inspired from Greece while the Artemyrans are canonically inspired from the Amazons. Some of the lore is a little obscure now, but all of it will be discussed gradually as the story goes on.
> 
> [2] Romance is . . . a complicated word. Can we all just settle with you having some form of kindling feelings for Sinbad?
> 
> [3] Minor edit: let's just disregard canon ages for a moment by aging up Sinbad to 18 and making reader a year older. 
> 
> [4] Warnings for sensitive topics such as cultural misandry, infanticide, isolationism, prostitution, and minor violence

As many things, it starts with curiosity.

His eyes shine with them; incandescent and exotically gold—you have never seen golden eyes before, never on a person within the ravines. His companions are equally unique in appearance, though something draws you in about this one, even likening his eyes to the gleaming yellow pair of a lynx. An interesting fact to note, because those wild cats are clever and unpredictable creatures—and unlike their giant birds, untamable.

The foreigner is a curious young man, peering and preying about in Icaria.

He doesn’t recognize you and you don’t let yourself be recognizable.

You don’t realize he will be an important figure and his reality is set on building on it.

Your exchanges are brief. The words, however, endure longer than they should.

“You won’t enjoy them as you think you will, foreigner. Many of our women keep to themselves,” you advise, when he asks about their brothels. His redheaded friend appears dejected of the matter. “They would rather enjoy their own company in the night than the likes of a man.”

This doesn’t faze him, though. It’s the image of youthful bravado and his voice carries its confidence. “Perhaps, they haven’t found a man who can satisfy them yet.”

You raise a questioning brow at him. _And you will uphold to this?_

Some part of you—the deep-rooted Artemyran pride—scoffs at his statement, but you go against it. For a time, you remain unspoken, until a word leaves your lips and later you realize that you are curious, too.

You lift a noncommittal shrug. “Perhaps.”

He is a fool for provoking the Queen. You are a fool for humoring him a conversation within a tavern.

The both of you meet by chance and dashed expectations in the red-light district.

One miniscule event leads to another, and the last thing you are anticipating is drinking idly with the brash foreigner that has dared to challenge your older sister in strength and _win _at that. No man or woman has ever bested Mira in a fight. _That says something._ You muse furtively from your goblet.

Regardless, you like the good-humored manner he speaks to you and how he can effortlessly pull you in a story or two. You like that he pours ale for you, that he always attempts to pry you into admitting some foul little secret, that his smile can stretch on for a mile without even meaning to.

“I see that you are . . . hm, uninformed about our brothels,” you observe his disheveled state, as if roughhoused by a pair of angry hands from a scuffle. The malakoi’s treatment of patrons have always suited the women’s needs. It only makes you ponder of his . . . fragility. Sort of. “Women don’t entertain guests in such places, I’m afraid.”

“Learned it the hard way,” Sinbad grumbles out, drinking bitterly, and at the sight of it, you attempt to sympathize with him. “Well. Anyway, what were you doing in the red-light district,” and then he clears his throat, belatedly recalling who he has spoken out of line to, “ah, if you don’t mind me asking, Princess.”

Your brows raise. “To be entertained, of course,” you decide to discard the little detail about having not been entertained—_yet_—at all. When he sends you an odd look, you roll your eyes at him. “I’m not above paying for a night.”

A cry of outrage, a half-witted ridicule, man’s ignorance; you expect those, as you’ve encountered foreigners who have done so and haven’t lived to tell the tale within the country. Customs of the outside world are strange, enforcedly restricted, and as the wise women call it, _patriarchal_. Men rule and women are conquered.

_Not all_, you know, when immortal Reim has its Magi Priestess and belligerent Kou has its Empress. However, you know that kind of mentality still runs dark into their roots too, no matter how exceptional their women are.

But to your surprise, he takes it quite well. “So how did that turn out for you?”

You shed a hint of a bleak smile. “Same as you, foreigner.”

Predictable. Pandering. _Passionless_.

On that one night, you once again learn to appreciate that boyish eagerness that lights up his curious, curious eyes. It’s a matter of one long lingering glance for the other to whisper that _‘we’re kindred spirits’ _and the rest unfolds onto itself, when he strikes up a question and your answer leads the both of you to a private unbothered crevice in the high forests. Yet still.

_It’s taboo for Artemyran royalty to consort with a foreign man._

The truth is that it hardly crosses your mind when you remember the earth, the scent of wild vine and grass, the sweltering heat of sex. How it pulses loud within your veins, how it feels so primal, uncontrolled and unpredictable as chaotic nature. The both of you paw at each like Sardonian cubs; restlessly clawing, tugging, tearing at each other's clothes. It's a careless messy affair, but the pulse in your veins, the fiery youth in your blood, says it all, within beats of bites and gropes.

But your foreigner surprises you. He always surprises you.

He starts off with a wager. It ends with you sitting on a throne of rock and bog, naked legs spread wide, and him kneeling between your thighs. You wonder if he can take back your words. _I'm an Artemyran and I won't weep for you_. You want him to. You feel yourself ache at the thought.

"This is my first."

"Really?" it flutters out of your mouth with astonished wings. You marvel over his sincerity. It gives a vivid color on his handsome face. "This is my first, too."

It’s his turn to mirror back your surprise. For a moment, you want to share his vulnerability. _This is my first night_. But you still lie behind your teeth, curling up an amused smile: "To be taken like this, that is." That isn't entirely false, but you never admit the truth. You want him to figure it out by himself.

And so when Sinbad touches you, boldly; your lips, the flat plane of your stomach, the very enclave between your legs, trenching on nether regions that elicit the sweetest weakness from your mouth. He notices, eyes flickering at you. For an interval, you realize being desired makes your heart race and the whim overtakes you to kiss him just for it.

Then he kisses you, and kisses you down _there_ tentatively, meaningfully, breathlessly._ A fast learner_, you think, admiring his intuition to pick up on your sensitive corners. Your toes curl from his shoulders. He coaxes out a rapture from you, a rapture so deep you wonder if it will scar you to the bone. _A woman bleeds on her first_, they say. But you wonder if you will, with this slippery heat that he laps and drinks down. Rock, roll, sway; you’re a wave against him, on and on and on, and you hit a tide once he reels you in with his tongue and you wonder if you can reach the Moon beaming down at you. You crash.

Intercourse is another matter, another story to shelve down and reimagine. For the first time, you acknowledge fullness. A graceless awkwardness. A wet hot stab of pain. Completion is met with your joined bodies, your joined curiosities, your joined longings. He groans at the pressure. You move against him. It's almost good. But.

_He came too fast. You withdrew away. _

In the end, you win his wager. You don't mind it that much. It isn't a dissatisfying turn. But you still feel yourself ache and you still yearn to catch on fire and you still want him to take you.

Though you're stubborn and your pride can't bear admitting it aloud. As you dress, you assure him with a peck on the cheek. “We’ll get it right someday.”

He sounds too hopeful. “Ah, that’s a promise then?”

Trust isn’t an issue with you and your Queen because you will do anything for her, as will she if asked in turn. Moon sisters hold a bond stronger like no other. As your blood is one, your blade is hers to cut and your strength is hers to use.

All except one secret from one questionable night.

So when Mira—being the stubborn woman that she is—meddles in your private affairs, asking if you have intentions to be a Hekatos vestal, or to join the Dianai Agrotera to accept the role as a foresworn huntress of Dia, you laugh under your breath, as the both of you glide into a swift turn from the rocky folds of the ravines.

“I’m not a virgin, Mira.”

“Is that so? You never tell,” she glances back at you, flaxen hair shining against the sun. “Then do you have a lover?”

Aello crows under you, spreading out her wide massive wings of whites and amber-golds and sky-blues. You soar up in a graceful sweep, speeding past crystalline falls, and your sister follows behind you, shouting out a good-natured snide, _show-off_. Reiman trading ships rivet your attention below. Those damn ships, you recall with disdain before your thoughts rebelliously flit on a certain foreigner. “Hm . . . not quite a lover.”

Mira overhears. Thank the Three Sisters, she _misinterprets_.

“Ah,” she voices out in an amused drawl. “Was the malakoi worth a night?”

_He’s not a prostitute, sister._

You admit, anyway. “I’d rather forget who he is.”

At the back of your mind, you know that there is a great irony in your ordeal. Fate must have laughed and you implore for Hekate’s wisdom and guidance and strength for what is to come after your Queen’s absurd request.

You lean back at the marble pillar. “Don’t assign him to me,” you recall time and time again that your sister has spared that young man, but for the price of an alliance, he brings up a proposition that she, as well as the people, must determine his character and prove his worth in trade _and_ trust.

Sinbad is determined, of course. So he stays.

_For a year._

You remember him wink at you after that. _Ambitious fool_, you scoff at the memory.

Resigning to a sigh, you fix your gaze up the domed ceiling that has intrigued you ever since you were a toddler; once upon a time, when an adolescent Mira has taken you by the hand, showing you the throne room that she shall rule in. The ceiling reminds those who enter about the power of a queen. It is painted with murals rich with histories and legends and wars won by the foundress, Queen Hippolyta, blood of Artume, champion of the Three Sisters.

Still, you have the gall to retort back to your sister. “I’m not his master.”

She grins at the thought. “Wouldn’t it be lovely to be his master? But I find his insolence quite unattractive and he's too young. I’d rather have the tall one,” she admits, and it’s an expected answer, considering how much she takes so many lovers to her bed and tosses them aside when she grows tedious. “A shame, however. He's a foreigner.”

_That_ makes you flinch.

“Besides they still have something to compensate to us,” she walks to the balcony in armored gold and silk that flutters around her like a fog. Or perhaps like wings, you think, that overshadows everything beneath it. “It’s an interesting tale to tell. How you convinced him to surrender after our fight,” she stares at their strange group being led by the Agoraea Artemos to the guesthouse. “I trust you know how to manage him best.”

Your eyes trail after them for awhile before straying back at her. “But you’re the one who gave him a chance,” you point out, folding your arms to your chest. “What do you see in him, Mira?”

The Queen hums in reflection. “The world can use more interesting people.”

_“You’re interesting.”_

Your sister never really cares much for the world outside the ravines, but you can agree with her that you look forward to what he has to offer.

Artemyra lies at the edge of the world; fenced over with saw-toothed rock-valleys that devour sailboats and swallow them within their narrow waters that slip through deeper banks at the throat. It’s almost as if it purposely hides itself from the world, he thinks—wandering, partially lost in his current of thought, when he also thinks of you. 

It occurs to him that the both of your paths converge in strange way. Here, in the winding causeways of the City of the Sky, abound with temples and aeries and lush greenery that mantle the great ravines with a thriving wilderness unheard of to him. Abound too, of its women of ash-flaxen manes and inked bodies that he traces like a grapevine uncoiling from the bare skin of your back and_ somewhere else . . . _

_If you keep gawking like that, you’ll attract an arrow to your eye, foreigner, _Sinbad recalls your first words to him with a slight smile, and then attempts to jog up behind you, short-winded and worn and beaten under the harsh sun. There are no flat roads built in Artemyra; only steepness, only long winding footpaths that stretch on like a mud snake that knows no end.

They’re staring at him, though. Like he’s an exotic animal, like a piece of meat, like scum. There’s a feral glint in them that glistens like the point-edge of a blade, and no passing glance is more prevalent than some of the Agoraea Artemos, the queensguards’ glares. Tall, proud, plumed from their helmets, draped in bearskin cloaks, how can he not recognize them and the blood in their eyes?

When you turn back to him and a cross between rare graciousness and amusement flashes your eyes, he sighs in relief as he dares to stare back at you. His gaze meeting yours. Any Artemyran woman would threaten to stab his eyes from the audacity, though somehow, he is able to grasp that there lurks something meaningful in yours. Unbidden still, but a little hard not to look away, he confesses.

You enthuse him to trek onwards, and he suggest to fly. You chuckle.

“One day, we’ll fly.”

_Not today though_. He slumps in dejection, abiding to you from the slopes and the whistling winds and your fast pace ahead of him. He realizes then that there’s loam smudged on your feet, that your clothes are wrinkled, that your hair haloes around your head like snarled-up starlight, that despite the blue in your blood and your practiced disposition, an unbranched wildness thrives in you in freckles and scratches and scars. He marvels.

When the shroud of the high forests greets its humble visitors, you run and he feels as if he is catching up to a brisk wind, heels hot and sweat pouring and laughter loud, because he starts to understand you from the trails you leave for him to chase after. He’s never seen such dense vastness before, mazed within great gnarling oaks as tall as hills, clusters of shrubbery and evergreen and wild heather, and dappled sunshine that paints your colors in vivid green and gold and silver.

But your eyes are the same, staring distantly to some undiscovered road that is unknown to anyone but yourself. Perhaps it’s fascination, perhaps it’s adventurous spirit, but he wants to see it, give in to it too, as you do barefooted, far-sighted, breath-taken, trailing after the ancient grooves of the earth and beyond.

“Where next?” Sinbad asks, flushed from trudging up the precipice of a boulder desert. Beneath lies the lake, beckoning all wildlings to jump in and take a dip to its wide, wide cerulean mouth.

Breathless from the hike, you smile. “Ahead.”

Dusk chases dawn, sunset then sunrise, stretching ribbons of light from the crags and the creeks. The days have wheeled on in the eternal forests and the hunt continues in its slow steady fare. In noontide, the thick foliage above almost takes the resemblance of a thousand flecked hands that shelter those beneath. Crouching down, he fills his waterskin from a purling stream.

“In Artemyra, children are taught to hunt for as young as ten summers,” you start musingly, sharpening your arrowheads against a whetstone. Your bow and quiver leans at the side of your calf—that he notices is etched with four deeply striped scars, pale-old and jagged. “It’s a test of wills and strengths. The wise women believe that it makes their connection to the lands stronger.”

He contemplates about this, still needing to build strong bridges with the country. “Then if I hunt like one of you, will I get a more favorable opinion?”

“You’ll get praise,” you tell him, but the slight curve of your lips speaks otherwise. “However, the hunt isn’t just about honing one’s skill, or claiming the best quarry. Hm, it’s also _like_ . . . like a deeper understanding of the trees, and the beasts, and the seasons,” arrowheads forgotten, other queries abandoned, you continue on and he listens, “like why the monsoon comes in periods, why the barren seeds grow, why the birds sing, the cycles and the tempests, all those and more.”

And there is more to learn, he thinks before the day is done. More to understand before he is accepted. More to see from you, as you teach him about shooting, recognizing animal calls, and following woodland trails, like how you map out his skin with the seam of your mouth within the dank womb of a cave hidden beneath treacherous waterfalls.

Sinbad admires you for many things, and grace isn’t one of them when you’re a storm above him, below him, against him, whichever.

The dance is no slow-burn, no romantic sweep of the hand. There’s just fever and tongues and heady scents, as he buries his nose to your hair, breathing in the sun and lemongrass and sweet heather. “Tell me something, anything . . . I want to hear you,” he whispers, licking the shell of your ear. You shiver, muttering out that he’s demanding. With a chuckle, he stares back at you with a faultless smile. “Please?”

Your fingers curve at the side of his jaw. There’s a rough kind of art to them, calloused but elegant. “No,” a corner of your lips twitches up into a half smile as his eager hands peel at your garments, baring the wet skin of your shoulder, the swell of your breasts, your navel, your brazen hips that rise up to meet his, swerving in, anchoring. “You, hah . . . you’ll hear mm—me, anyway, won’t you?” because there’s no eloquence in it, coherency lost to hot breaths, language to movement.

You claw for him, unstringing his breeches; sliding, grasping, coaxing out a strangled groan. He sighs from your chin, knees heavy and weak at the stray idling thought if it’d been your mouth. “If you continue . . . _that_, w-what you’re doing,” he shudders out a rush of air through his teeth, his hand clasping yours under, _damn damn damn_, “I’m not going to last with you at all, aren’t I?”

Sinbad doesn’t remember who, but someone speaks out about another wager between you two. Regardless, it ends with you tumbling down from a kiss and him taking you without ceremony. This time, no one wins and the both of you collapse at each other’s arms.

He’ll never forget that it’s also in this shared space that you come out honestly, dry leaves stuck in your hair, lips ardent:

“Tell me about the world you’ve seen.”

However, the first time Sinbad asks you why you don’t soar off to the world outside your ravines, the night has fallen and the fire dies a little, like the embers in your eyes.

Those same eyes flit back at him and they linger. You never say anything, but there’s a howl in the distance and it echoes for you somehow, thrown out to the dark with nothing to carry it through him. He mulls over the wolf’s song. Mulls over you.

Your hand brushes his shoulder. “You’re tired, Sinbad,” then you drift away from his reach.

_Artemyra acknowledges no King_, you tell him.

The last man who has claimed to be one is slain and ripped apart limb by limb; his blood and bones offered as a sacrifice to the Great Mother Hawk Phoebe. There shall always be queens and moon sisters and crones, all daughters of proud and warring Artume.

In the ninth month, it is celebrated by many a huntress and warrior through a hunt and a feast. As with tradition, the false king, the usurper, Taurus is symbolized as a crowned bull and a representative shall be chosen by the wise women for the sacred killing. You chew thoughtfully, the wild berries staining your lips a sticky crimson. “This time round, I’m given the honor to be Artermis Tauropolos.”

Slanted beside you, taking shelter under the canopy of a yew tree, Sinbad plucks out a berry from your palm, as with sweet Proserpina who has eaten the bloodred seeds of the polysporia. You ponder if this makes you Aides, curiously staring at him. “Tauropolos?” he asks.

“The bull-slayer,” you smirk once he swallows down the fruit and it scorches down his throat, “it might as well be king-slayer, too.”

He starts to cough. “What did I eat—”

“Pyropos berries,” you idly take another one of them. Fire-eyed, you recall its name. Sweet, tart, tasting of flame. “It burns, doesn’t it?”

You catch his mild surprise when you climb up to his lap and bring your waterskin to his face. He cusses under his breath. His hand molds against yours, pulling, twining them, as he drinks in desperate gulps.

“A handful more of these can poison, if one is unaccustomed,” you watch his throat bob up and down, spilling a clear trail down his neck, while his other hand crawls to your winged ankle, the length of your calf. “It bites at the mouth first,” ringed fingers graze the bronze skin of your thigh, “smolders at the base of the throat,” pushes up your skirt, higher, _higher_, “then it drops like an ember and the stomach is enflamed,” and you stop him there, just at the ball of your knee. He grapples.

“And you didn’t warn me about that earlier,” withdrawing the waterskin from his lips, you swoop down to kiss him. You still taste of Pyropos and when your poison-coated tongue meets his, it must have seared. You compensate when you consider grinding against his crotch.

Rocking your hips, you whisper against his mouth. “It won’t kill you.”

“But you will,” he rasps out a wisp of a chuckle, “won’t you, Artermis Tauropolos?”

Feathers in your hair, eyes like rhodonite, a calm sharpness in your intonation; Sinbad remembers you in the city first, the throne room second. The third in the aftermath of the fray. He tries to salvage a memory of you from death row. If you have stripped him relentlessly as the women have, if you have clawed for him to tear skin with bloodied nails, but no violent retaliation comes to his mind and it blurs with your stride ahead of him; as he follows you and sits down from his makeshift cell, tied-up, compliant, robbed of his metal vessels, again.

He chuckles at the irony. One will think that a master of a djinn has an advantage beating him than the one that isn’t.

Observing his surroundings, he gives in to a low whistle. A private room. Small space, no openings, one heavily guarded door.

And surprisingly, just you. Chin held high, back straight; you don’t look regal or pristine, much less a blood relative to royalty with your humble clothes and mud-slicked sandals, but he senses a kind of quiet authority reverberating from you and a patience lingering like a bird of prey.

“So about my friends. . .”

“They’re fine,” you assure him, but he still attempts to gouge out if there is hostility in your inflections. _Undecided_, he muses, when he senses no riptide in your current; your waves languid but not without rocks underneath. “They won’t be harmed.”

Sinbad opts a humble tone for appearances, but he still _is_ grateful. “Then I thank you, Princess.”

“Oh don’t thank me yet, foreigner. After what transpired, my people are strongly siding to the Agoraea Artemos on skinning _you_ alive and feeding your body to the beasts. Regardless, you and your friends’ lives still hang on the Queen’s final word after her recovery.”

Sighing under his breath, he considers imploring you through your sympathies, if there is any. “I understand . . . but if worse comes to worst, can you spare them—”

“My sister is honorable,” you interrupt him, voice steadfast and confident. “Ill-tempered, prejudiced too, but honorable. You contended with her in a duel. You won. She won’t kill you or anyone in cold blood after fairly losing to you, that I’m sure.”

Then your lips give way to a spur of a chuckle. Once again, he contemplates on his firsts, and while he meets you in the city, he’s never seen you smile. “But you’re quite something, aren’t you?” you remark. “So the rumors about you are true then, Sinbad of Tison.”

What kind of rumors, how much do you know, have you just been pretending this whole time, and the questions pile on like unsent letters to a furnace. His mind is cluttered for a while until he cleans up and stares back at you with decisive clarity. “You’ve . . . heard of me?” he carefully asks, mulling over the important question: _how_. “I thought Artemyra is an isolated country.”

“Very. No one cares about the outside world here, unfortunately,” _but_, he notices, there is you and the unvoiced wistfulness in your eyes. He listens.

“Regardless, there are some accounts of you in Narpolia from traveling merchants,” _the amphitheater_, he answers for himself before you casually continue: “and then there is Parthevia that apparently wants your head on a stake.”

Sinbad tenses. _Will you . . . ?_

You breath in, locking your eyes firmly to his. Now, he sees it. For a flash, you look like the Artemyran Queen.

He remembers you in occasional blips when you have talked to them on the path to the great aerie of Arteminakastro; when you have shared whispers with the Queen upon their judgement; earlier, when you have spoken out of turn to defend him from your people’s spears. Before he is ever given a chance to have another audience with the Queen, he realizes there that you are the one he must persuade.

“You know, before dungeons and djinns and monsters, there were conquerors and kings who searched for land to take for their own. Artemyra endured them for a century. You come here with promises of trade and peace, but while a dungeon capturer and a conqueror are two separate entities, I’d like to know one thing,” you say, cocking your head at him, “do you intend to conquer my country, as you had with the others?”

Conquer. _Take, seize, plunder, as Parthevia has for years—_

“No,” he speaks out with conviction. “It is my best intention to form an alliance. In your people’s terms, I believe it is similar to that of a ‘pact of blood’; one that is made to consolidate peace and mutual negotiations within two parties, however in my case, it’s to serve as a bridge for countries through trade, where no means of conquering are used to bound and oppress as conquerors have done, but to bolster the other and build upon it by understanding one’s differences. This I have learned as a travelling merchant; that one can adherently come to an agreement and acknowledge each other.”

“And why is that?” you question, brows furrowed thoughtfully. “Why have _you_, a mere merchant of any other name, take it upon yourself to form this alliance of peace and why with this country that has long since lost interest intermingling with the world?”

“Princess, my dream is to live in a world of peace, where one and all may learn to understand and accommodate each other. Not possible and foolhardy, yes, but not entirely out of reach; a world rid of wars and a country that arbitrates warring ones—a country which this merchant of any other name will create, but I am not alone, as I am supported by my companions and my company and this alliance in order to fulfill this dream.”

“As many unique countries, Artemyra is its own, and one that I seek to lend me her hand in this dream. I wish to gain her trust and strengthen her rapport with other countries through opening her horizons through means of trade, as Artemyra has opened herself to Reim.”

“How . . . ambitious,” you comment, stifling a laugh. “Trade, I understand. A country of your own. _Peace_ . . . that is a big word to simply flaunt around, if you are to tack the world to it. But, you see, while it is a very . . . grand noble dream, and I do appreciate your sincerity, my best interest still hinges on my country. Should your company flourish, Artemyra shall, too. Should it not, she could sustain herself anyway. You see the difference here, Sinbad?”

You continue on, “Artemyra shall always love her autonomy. More so, she is unwilling to reach out to the world when she is kept here, in this fertile rock. It isn’t my intention to demean your dreams, but it’s just a piece of advice I’d like you to consider before you confront the Queen again.”

“Perhaps, this is of no exception, but Artemyra, too, has a long history war. It runs in our blood, some will say, but that time is over after the war with Akaea a few years ago. At peace, for the time being. War is born through many things, many reasons, but the one that started it with Akaea so long ago was from arrogance. And no one scorns man’s arrogance more than Artemyra. Perhaps, it isn’t your intention, but your confidence _will_ sound arrogant to them, and my Queen will have to take action to that. A man claiming to form an alliance when he has near to nothing? A man who speaks of trade and agreements, but defeats figureheads with aggression to make a peaceful world . . . does that not contradict your words?”

Sinbad holds a breath. Waits.

“‘If you are willing to make a pact of blood, come to us with humility and draw your blood,’ that is how the saying goes,” you advise, folding your arms over your chest. “Bold words and grand noble dreams won’t sway my people, but I do wish you the best of luck with the convincing part. You’re a smart lad. You can figure it out yourself. Make it worth my sister’s while,” and then you shrug, gaze telling, “so I won’t lose face after risking myself for your lot.”

_I’m still given a chance. _His eyes pulse wide at the slow realization. “Wait . . . why did you help me?”

“You’re interesting,” you confess, baring a wry smile at him. “I hardly meet people as interesting and foolish as you, much less near my age.”

However, you stop short on your reasons when there is still so much to uncover about you and you won’t let him in. He struggles to decide whether you actually acknowledge him for his potential with a shrewd eye, or perhaps it’s just that you’re too nonchalant that you take everything for granted. Regardless, there is an end to your actions that somewhat aligns to his own. He gambles with Fate. With you.

Before you leave, Sinbad calls you back, eyes searching yours. Gold against rhodonite.

“Princess, may I know your name?”

You curse the day he tricks you into sailing with him on a damn ship. You curse the start of the voyage. You curse Poteidas’s watery grave, the rough-and-tumble of the ocean, the unbalanced course of the vessel. You curse sea-sickness and the smell of brine and the amused twinkle in his eye. You almost evoke upon Rhamnousia’s wrath to throw him off board.

Sinbad apologizes after you go limp in attempting to wrestle out a pained wail of regret from him. It’s a mockery on your reputation. After all the tribulations you have spent in your life, you know that you have endured worse extremes than _this_.

“I’ve heard Artemyrans don’t do well in the sea,” he lifts you up, slinging your arm on his shoulder. “So it’s true for the lot of you?”

_A myth_, you think, when Artemyran men pride themselves as sailors and fishermen. Incensed, you yank his hair for it. “_So_ you test this theory on me then.”

“Unintentionally—_ow_, sorry, sorry,” he pries away your hand from his hair. “I didn’t realize you can’t take sailing.”

“I travel through the sky. I don’t need to sail,” you feel yourself grow nauseous from the current, but you withhold yourself, for your sake. “But I guess I can’t help it, I’m closer up there,” your gaze flutters over his, and you can’t help but read the sentiment that he harbors in it, as he stares at the waves as he will an old friend. “You seem fond of the sea.”

Sinbad smiles. “It’s only ever been my life.”

“You’ll love my father then,” you tell him, leaning weakly on the mast. “All that fool knows is how to sail,” and then your eyes follow the sea, the wave-trail unclear and never-ending, “it’s his life, too.”

As a girl-child born in the clan of Artemina, the choices are freely given to you.

To lead, you become a leader; to hunt, you become a huntress; to fight, you become a warrior; to offer, you become a vestal; as High Priestess Hipp foretells you in the incensed atrium of the Hekatos Temple, her eyes a milky-white and blind to you, but never to Hekate’s infinite wisdom. You pray for a hundred times and a thousand graces. _All this and more_, imparts High Priestess Hipp. All this and more. More, more, more.

However, you struggle from the bountiful life that you live. Gifts are kind, gifts are full, gifts should always be taken with gratitude. You have many gifts and many choices and you are blessed and abundant and bloated from them. You don’t know what to choose. You don’t know what to be.

You always selfishly ask for her wisdom tenfold, but Hekate provides too many answers and too less clarity.

But your father reaches out to you in his simplicity from the sea. His large hand outstretched and open; calloused and dark too, you recall, underneath the sun and the sandy shores. His eyes don’t shine like morganite or pink coral. They’re an Akaean blue, deep and profound as with the crest of a wave. The memories almost blur like the rushing currents, ebb away like seafoam, but you remember him catch a swordfish so lucidly that time.

Your father doesn’t feel the way you do. How the creature writhes in the air, how its tail flounces about for water, how it doesn’t understand the surface world that floats above oceans and tides. You almost sob at the feeling back then. It’s afraid and confused, and you tremble at the thought.

“I understand,” your father says, clapping a hand on your small shoulder. He teaches you a lesson that day, when he kneels and whispers gently and prays in gratitude, even if his faith doesn’t align with the Three Sisters. The wind croons around him in approval. He looks it in the eye. The long dagger is raised by his hand, “This is mercy, my pearl,” and it falls.

Like how his arrowhead pierces through a deer.

Your heart rips open. “You caught one. Good shot, Sin.”

His chest puffs. “Yeah, I did pretty great at—hey, are you all right?”

It still aches, deep inside you. Man—no, _not all_ are attuned to animals as your people are, and you can’t blame him for that. _The Bond_, the Dianai Agrotera call it, a gift bestowed from Dia herself, pulses in your veins and you feel every beat and sensation rippling under your skin and the beast shot by the blow.

“Come.”

Carefully, Sinbad does beside you, kneeling before the struck-down deer on the ground. “Everything is sacred; the forest and its creatures. They brim with life, you see, and for us to borrow from them, it must be done with gratitude,” you take a deep breath and recite a prayer, eyes on the deer, your hand wrapped around his steady ones and the dagger, “and mercy.”

Together, the both of you plunge down the dagger to its heart with ceremony. The creature breathes its last with calm resignation. The birds of paradise reflect over its eyes in brilliant white and it sleeps. _It drifts back to the Great Flow, my pearl, as all things should when the right time comes,_ your father’s words echo, and you can see it, too. “Be at peace, tranquil one,” you whisper.

Sinbad looks at you and you offer him a smile. He smiles back and returns a respectful gesture.

“Be at peace.”

“So do your people have problems eating meat?”

You stir the wooden ladle in the iron pot perched on the open fire. A part of him is puzzled by this uncharacteristic air of domesticity around you. It’s unthinkable, but you always keep to yourself and he doesn’t question it aloud. Another layer of you he has yet to explore, Sinbad considers.

“You’d be surprised how many of us are vegetarians. Oh—careful skinning that rabbit,” you chide him, tossing in rock salt, legumes, and wild mushrooms in the bubbling thin broth. The aroma settles down his gut and more complicated ingredients waft by like peppercorn, marjoram leaves, a quarter clove of garlic, and a pinch of crimson-threaded spice, which you proudly remark on: “lovely, no? The taste is, that is. A little hard to scrounge for this one in imports.”

He recognizes it, though. “That’s zarparan, isn’t it? I’ve seen it before in Balbadd, I believe.”

“Zarparan, eh? Akaean spice merchants sell it as red krokos,” you say, shrugging. “I suppose it’s the same.”

Once the rabbit meat is cooked in and your clay bowls are filled, you then recall his previous question. “Though not all are bothered by eating meat, despite the Bond,” you thoughtfully chew on a piece of rabbit. “After all, it’s disrespectful to waste the life you’ve taken, be that venison or cattle, whichever.”

Sinbad gives the stew a curious tentative chew. It’s an earthy taste, with a mild heat kicking in at the back of his tongue. “Ah, I see,” he hums, pursuing the conversation. “Then, hm, what about poultry?”

You stop there, sending him a withering glance. “You’re fortunate Aello’s out hunting. She would’ve clawed your eyes out, had she overheard you. Artemos Hawks are intelligent creatures, you see. Very touchy about the subject, too,” he nods, clearing his throat, as well as his potentially life-endangering assumptions, “so for your question, no. It’s forbidden to kill all birds here.”

Pushing it aside, he went on distracting himself with his bowl. “Then I’ll make a mental note to never mention it.”

“Also, another thing, Sin,” you smirk knowingly at him. “I’m curious . . . one of your friends told me you eat snakes.”

He almost chokes at your words, but he still takes them with a grain of pride. “Well, you’d be surprised how they’d make as a good dish.”

Somewhere from border between the high forests and the marble temples of Hekate and the dwelling coves of the mother hawks is a small hut of stone and wood, veined in streams of curling wild vine and ankle-deep grass that your sister comments on being irksome. You invite her inside your modest abode, leaving the few trout you’ve caught and salted earlier to dry out under the forenoon sun.

Mira stands out like beaten gold against earthen wares, wicker chairs, and shingles. It’s a nagging habit of hers to remind you that you have several chambers in Arteminakratos that far surpass this recluse space; a matter which you assure her that you will seldom come by because all your moth-eaten tomes and trinkets remain there. Regardless, arguments don’t last long between the two of you and your sister abides to your decision in the end.

You break flatbread and she accepts a piece with juniper berries and a cup of warm palm wine. It isn’t the sort of thing royalty should eat, but your sister still remarks that you’re a different kind of princess, ‘one that will rather be a panther-wife and talk with the trees and Wild Dionos over honeyed wine,’ as she has often teased since you have undergone your coming-of-age.

Sitting casually with a leg hoisted up, Mira dips a portion of her bread in oil and black vinegar. “How are you faring in your search for new land?”

You pluck out a berry, pinching it between your fingers. “Fruitless.”

You tamp down a sigh. It isn’t so much that Artemyra is in need to expand and you even admit to yourself that it isn’t for any noble cause, but you long for broader stretches of territory that rests from the other side of this world. _That there’s more._ Though that matter comes into question, when you have walked and grown with the high forests for so long that you have already considered it as a kin, closer to you than any other branch in the Artemina Clan. Except your sister, of course.

However, the truth of the matter is that there is no beyond. Farther from the wilderness is the sea, farther from the sea is the islands of Akaea, and father from Akaea is uncharted oceans and lands unknown to you. You chew in your contemplation and the dark fruit crushed by your teeth tastes bitter.

Swirling her ale, Mira then snaps you from your musings. “How is the foreigner?”

“He’s taking his time, but he’s picking up quite well,” you tell her before sighing, “what is with that look, Mira.”

Mira shrugs, pink eyes appraising and intrusive. “No interesting tale to tell?”

You drone flatly. “Like?”

“Oh, come now, don’t you ever gossip,” Mira says. “Anything peculiar about him? He doesn’t act like one of our men. Any strange habits, some kind of slip of tongue, maybe even a promiscuous character?”

“He certainly wouldn’t act like one of ours,” you chuckle. “His confidence is something I do notice, I think. It reminds me of you, sometimes,” and then your lips lift up into a wry smirk, “full blown and out of proportion.”

“Very informative,” Mira humors you with a scoff, rolling her eyes. Her forgotten cup is placed down the wooden table, a dull thud echoing at the space between you two. “In all due seriousness, be careful around that young man, sister,” for a silent lingering moment, she looks at you meaningfully. “He’s a strange one for his commitment in learning our ways, but ambitious for making friends with prominent figureheads, nevertheless. You’ve been with him long enough, I suppose. Do you think he’s worthy of your trust?”

You shrug halfheartedly. “I believe I’m somewhat insignificant. Besides, shouldn’t it be _your_ trust?”

“Naturally. But I don’t trust him either way,” Mira admits. “I trust you.”

Your heart lodges from your throat.

You press your lips together into a thin taut line. “. . . it’s too early to tell.”

Taking a bite of her bread, Mira only nods. “Very well then.”

“Mira—” at that moment, you hate yourself for holding your tongue, for stuttering in a second, because the truth is a foul thing and your sister means the world to you, “well, hmm, there is this rumor. . .”

Yet you still lie behind your teeth and you wish nothing more but for it to bleed out of your mouth.

Again, it haunts you. _It’s taboo for Artemyran royalty to consort with a foreign man._

From the blue aether, you decide to show him a piece of your world; more precious than gems, more exquisite than sky aeries, the wealth of Artemyra lies in the fertile land, with verdant forests and deep ancient waters that burrow turquoise streams; veined from the sea, rivers snake past rugged mounds of hills and sharp-ended cliffs that Aello traces through her wings with an agile grace that knocks the air from your foreigner’s lungs. He braces onto you tighter. You laugh out an apology.

You coast into a haze of soft mist that pelts over a belt of mountains, windswept and green-capped; only the earth knows their names, but you learn them through the lilting voice of the gale that quavers out their songs. Spinning, gliding, whirling like a cyclone, you go faster and faster through impossible heights. There’s an unspoken promise in your grin that you’ll show him what it feels like to touch the sun.

You soar like the wind, become like the wind, heaving up against the restless flow of the turbulence. You breathe in, out, and set your gaze onto a golden strip of the horizon and marvel at its boundlessness. He sees it, too. He awes.

“It’s beautiful.”

Sinbad reaches out, scraping the skyline with the pads of his fingers. How far can they reach from here, farther from the high forests, farther from Artemyra—

But they find you.

On the cusp of your shoulder, limbs entwining like sinews, hot palms touching.

_How novel_, you think, bemused. How he wraps himself around you, like this. You don’t feel small, but . . . safe, is it?

You flit up a smile behind your ruffled hair. You guide his hands, easing under the slide of them; feather-light brushes, subtle nudges, a wandering thumb tracing your knuckles. “This isn’t how you should fly,” you chastise, fingers enlaced, and you feel him smile, “but it’s close.” _So, so close. _

However the storm clouds gather, unfurling in the sky like violet-ashen scrubs, and it rains. Rearing Aello with a swerve, you gently descend down the forests, towards a safe cove mantled with a layer of thick moss; her wings brush at the trees, and each eucalyptus and pine sough through the motion, murmuring secrets amongst themselves.

At the back of your mind, you wonder how many cycles has the forests undergone to recognize a pair elope within its great wood?

Once settled inside, Aello adjusts herself to a dark corner, tucking in her wings to her large body, and the both of you attempt to dry off your clothes from the rain. A gust bursts in like a ragged breath. It evokes the gooseflesh from your arms and you welcome it, but your foreigner shivers and _sneezes_. The moment a spill of laughter falls down your lips, Sinbad sulks. He is too sensitive, sometimes.

You entreat him to the small fire that you have started, and he abides, slinking a shoulder close to yours, sliding warmth between you with the brush of his skin. You sink into it, slip and sigh and succumb to him somehow without him uttering out a clever line.

Vaguely, it reminds you of snow.

The first time you’ve seen snow, it’s from their duel.

You have only ever heard of it in epithets from odes and lyric poetry sung by bards with their lutes. You remember the books you have bartered with Akaean merchants for pieces of gold necklaces and amethysts; _Falling petals of winter_, the East call it; _The white dunes, frost-sands that melt in pale-gold_ from the steppes of the Tenzan Plateau;_ A bitter cold storm, a white vastness _from the western lands of Reim; _blue tundra, frozen seas, the snow country from the Extreme North_ spoken with fondness by the kindly Imuchakk man.

At a certain point in your life, your father has once described it as ‘brighter than Aktian pearls.’

_Miracle_, you put a name on it at the sight of snow beading on your palm, made of water and magic and ice. Time slows and snow dusts over the forest like frail fluttery salt. Then later on it leaves your sighing lips _white_, _beautiful_, _strange_, so much like him, as he descends down the skies in his state of apotheosis. Ice-pale skin furred like the lynx, bejeweled with power, eyes like the cast sun. How terrible, how beautiful.

The Agoraea Artemos surround him with their spears and arrows because they fear what they don’t understand and avenge what they believe is wrenched from them.

“For taking our Queen’s life, the price is your head!” threatens Deinomache, the captain of Agoraea Artemos. Your aunt.

Mira has fallen. There your sister lies; encapsulated in an ice casket, disgraced and frozen for her defeat. _She couldn’t be dead._ Your palm meets the frigid touch of rime and it’s the first time you realize that ice scorches, making the flesh of your fingers raw and pink. Would she burn inside too, as with a bright luminous pyre? You tremble from this cold. From this loss, from the white blistering anger of it. Of him. But.

You stare up, feeling the ice flakes run down your cheeks. Miracle. _The power of kings_, they say. The power to change the world. If the master of a djinn is the cause of this strange miracle, then he might take it back. Might revive your sister from her deep sleep. You are uncertain of many things, of many chances, but this you wish to believe. This you gamble.

Steeling your nerves, throat aching, you muster up your loudest voice. “Sister Deinomache,” you call out, drawing the attention of the crowd to yourself. Not many of your kinswomen recognize you as having the blood of Artume, that you are the wayward princess belonging to a kingdom of wilderness and moors than that of ivory-white aeries. That you are fickle and lost and _you_. “Lay down your weapons.”

In a glimpse of pale-gold, he sees you. “You. . .”

“Stay out of this, Princess!” Deinomache reproaches you, however. “He has killed our Queen! _Your sister._”

Sinbad argues back, “I didn’t. She is only frozen in ice, but she isn’t dead. I can unfreeze her if we come to an understanding.”

And you breathe in relief. _Thank the Three Sisters, Mira’s alive._

“_Lies, lies, lies!_” declare the Agoraea Artemos.

“And eradicate us all with your djinn’s power?” Deinomache accuses hotly. “We shall not be fooled by man’s lies.”

The loud chanting, the uproar, you fear the escalation of their conflict. The power of a djinn against your people and the spearheads cutting against one man. _Think. _Standing your ground, you attempt to convince your fierce aunt. “I hold his companions as hostages,” you say, recalling that they are detained in a cell after being immobilized from the mines. The foreigner is a fool to leave them behind. “He will listen to me.”

And Sinbad hears this, stiffening in apprehension. Deinomache notices. She glares at you and then him. Slowly, guardedly, she raises her hand at the Agoraea Artemos. “Princess,” she hisses under her breath, and some deep unrooted part of you remembers the words she imprinted on you as an ignorant child, _you are only fortunate to be a daughter of Artemyra._ “If this man doesn’t listen to you, you will do nothing, and we will kill him, as it should be.”

Sighing deeply, you nod. “As you say, Sister Deinomache.”

When you come to him, eyes unfazed, you tell him, “You, foreigner. Unfreeze the Queen, and turn back to the way you are. Then surrender the djinns’ gifts,” and then you implore him by the wrist, pulling him down into a careful whisper: “if you don’t, they will kill you and your companions or _die trying_, do you understand?”

He stares at you again and reads through your intentions. Perhaps, he gambles too.

Sinbad, who has defeated your Queen, the champion of the duel of djinns, Artume’s victor, surrenders.

You chuckle. You’re not one of his snow women; you don’t melt from his touch, not when you’re fire and wind and iron, but from the length of his shoulder, the column of his neck, you find yourself tethered comfortably in the cage of his arms.

For a time, you tell him stories over the fire of the creation and an age-old grief coming from the sky goddess Damate, who has lost her only son to the deep grounds of the earth; wherein his blood stained the soil a rich red, his shoulders the mountains, his bones made up the trees, his hair the vast generous foliage, and his right eye the Moon. Damate has wept and wept until oceans have consumed the earth and her tears have run as the great forked rivers of the country, splitting open the uneven rock of the land, and from its teeth-like edges formed the ravines of Artemyra.

“It rains too because of her,” you say, listening to its song heavily thrum down the trees. “For her son has become a part of the earth and the earth feeds from her love.”

Sighing, Sinbad stares at the crackling fire. “Then she mourns.”

“She loves in abundance,” you correct him, “even if it brings her to tears. Saving what is most precious to her, as all mothers do.”

An unvoiced part of you wishes to understand your words more deeply than how you have uttered it. Artemyra has her Three Mothers, like how moon daughters have their own. You have never met Queen Myrina; strongest of the warrior women, the dread conqueror of men, who fell not by steel but of childbirth. Mira’s the closest thing you can have to a mother.

And now you look at him, a son to another, and he smiles at the end of it, smiles so differently. You always muse how he can show everything and nothing behind the flash of a smile. There’s no tragedy behind his eyes, glowing in deep amber and pensive reflections, but you sense a poignancy there. You want to ask. Though he doesn’t touch on your past, and out of respect, you don’t either.

The both of you are strangers, still. A pair of storytellers that enthrall with words and weave out tales far from the truth and farther from yourselves.

Sinbad insists you continue, and you do in slight confidence about springs and water nymphs and sacred beasts of the night. Of the emmer wheat and the thousand-armed storm and the lovers born under the sycamore tree. You tell him of sons and daughters, kings and queens, man and woman; reflections of each other, as with the skies and the seas that are alike in their depth but never quite meet a middle.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: May have changes after I edit this out later. Actual stakes come in the second act as you grow older. Enjoy the lightheartedness for now. 
> 
> I'll come clean here and say right now that I'm kind of hopeless in writing PWPs. I'll eventually inject some form of plot in anything one way or another. And there's my tinsy bit of issue with what I'm doing with the relationship. I was going for a blatantly casual one-night stand, but it gradually kind of morphed into something between platonic and a friends-with-benefits type (the hell am I saying?). Tbh, I'm not sure haha. What do you think?


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